Fire and Water

Summer of 2005 I got on a bus at Port Authority to Richmond, Virginia. I was going to meet up with my very hot new girlfriend. We had started dating in March, on my birthday, and she was already talking about marriage. I didn’t feel secure about that, I didn’t think I was really the material for being a good mate. I was more of a phase a woman went through in her search for a mate. I expected her to dump me before long.

Anyway, the bus was leaving late at night. I sat near the front. it would be an all night bus trip. An all night bus ride is a state of consciousness close to sleep but not sleep, not at all restful, but a sustained hypnagogic revery until the dawning destination arrives.

As the bus was pulling out of Port Authority some passenger in front of me started a conversation with the driver about a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that was supposed to hit New Orleans soon. I guess I knew there was much media hype about it, but I was surprised when the conversation turned apocalyptic.

Well, we know the world won’t end with a flood, the driver said. “God gave Noah, the rainbow sign.”

That’s right, the passenger replied. No more water, the fire next time.

Bus Driver of the Apocalypse, I thought. Weird.

I drifted into that altered state of nocturnal Greyhound dreamtime

full of strange thoughts I couldn’t really put into words.

The rainbow is God’s promise to destroy the Earth by global cremation, I thought. Modern cosmologists hold that the sun will one day engulf our planet, some billion years from now. If all goes well humanity will figure out utopia by then and we’ll spend our time becoming intergalactic immigrants, or attaining a state of consciousness beyond life and death. Maybe this is what the belief in a “Rapture” is about, a dream of our evolutionary future as collective enlightenment. I dreamed on.

My girlfriend, as it happened, was in New Orleans, but left before Hurricane Katrina hit. She was with her sister, who was in town for a medical convention. She’s a pediatrician and would invite Lori to stay with her in a hotel in whatever cool city the convention was being held . They were out of the city by now. Lisa back in Houston and Lori in Richmond, so my interest in hurricane news evaporated.

Lori and her friend Jimmy met me at the bus station. We stayed at Jimmy’s house in a neighborhood where old houses had front porches where neighbors would stop and visit.. Lori and I were in art school at the same time, but in different cities. Oregon Hill reminded me of my old neighborhood in Cleveland. Jimmy carried the air conditioner he rarely used up from storage the basement to the second floor room we slept in. It was very hot and humid that August. 

Lori showed me around. We did a lot of walking.  She wore a green halter top I liked very much. Hollywood Cemetery is at the end of Jimmy’s street, near his house, and we’d go there. There is a big granite pyramid that serves as a memorial to more than 11,000 Confederate soldiers buried there, sacrificed to the lost cause.

I like Richmond. Lori went to school there, at Virginia Commonwealth, got her undergraduate degree in Commercial Design. She became a painter years later. When she was a student she wrote reviews of punk shows at local venues. She loved the Ramones. I think she wrote under the name Lori Richmond. I liked Lori’s many friends there and now they are my friends.

We walked to Monument Avenue where statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures stood. Richmond was the the capital of the Confederacy and was abandoned and burned by the soldiers fleeing Grant’s army. The statues were put there in the Jim Crow era to show that even if they lost the war the White power structure had not surrendered. It seemed like they would stand there forever. It was not a site to be proud of. I wondered when they would finally fix this boulevard of civic shame. It took another fifteen years, a global pandemic, and a video of a Black man choking to death under the knee of a White cop. During the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder the idols of Monument Avenue began to fall, until the only statue left is of Arthur Ashe, the Black tennis champion.

Praise God.

We didn’t watch TV at Jimmy’s. Maybe he didn’t have one and I think he still had to dial up his internet. What he has is thousands of vinyl record albums, because that is what Jimmy deals in. He buys and sells vinyl records. Lori played The Fall’s cover of the Kinks’ Victoria and I played her some Fred Neil, who became a favorite of ours. 

But no TV, and no news, and it wasn’t until we went to DC, where we’d take Amtrak home, that we got caught up on what was happening in New Orleans. We had lunch in a Nigerian restaurant that had a big screen TV where we all watched Americans standing in flood waters, who had lost everything, and who were crying out to an administration that only knew how to destroy.  Dubya was still Commander in Chief and we were in the second year of the War in Iraq. With two wars going on, Katrina was another fiasco he could claim. As in the 2020 pandemic, most of the suffering and dying after Katrina was among the poor and people of color. It is much easier to pull down flags and statues than it is to change a rotten and unjust system. James Baldwin warned us, if we don’t change it we will destroy ourselves. He might be wrong about next time, though. Next time it might be both fire AND water, and maybe a virus in the air.

But we didn’t know the bad news of Katrina when we were in Richmond that golden summer. We didn’t get married until a year later. but In my reminiscence, that week in Richmond seems like our real honeymoon. Jimmy came to the wedding and gave away the bride, and the following year we went on our official honeymoon, a gift from Lori’s sister, in New Orleans.